I think one of the main reasons this game has all but become Pokémon Glitch edition is the fact that wildcard is limiting all creativity outside of very specific, non-gameplay circumstances. The only things were you can somewhat get creative are canvas and other drawing activities, but any creative combinations of gameplay elements are forbidden.

When they first announced the bear traps, I was thinking up ways of using them in taming traps, only to find out that you cant use them on wild tames. Same thing for smoke and poison grenades and other tools that would have been awesome to work with.

In the same way, dinos get pushed into a very specific niche that is laid out specifically by the devs and programmed in such a way that unforseen interactions are not possible. Instead of going "this is an animal that has a hardened carapace with sharp edges, so these stats work in such and such a way" they go "this pokemon dino collects flint". By ensuring that no other creature is good at collecting flint, they remove all creative possibilites from the player to mantain total control over the gameplay and also turn the animals into lifeless tools.

Furthermore, the static and predictable nature of creatures (either a murderbot with factionnumber carnivore or a passiv runawaybot with factionnumber herbivore) removes any need for creative ways of taming. If things like herds, carnivore rivalrys, hunger meters and territorys would exists, taming would revolve around knowing and using these factors, like when is this carnivore sleepy due to having eaten, where is its territory or nest, how do I guide this wild herd of sheep into a pen etc. Since none of this exists, the devs have to implement "creative" ways of taming forcibly by hand, although nothing about "click e 20 times every 5 seconds" to tame (equus) or "have item x for creature y and item a for creature b" is actually creative but just simply looking up and then doing the same thing again and again."

So, there simply isnt anything to do other than grind and tame the optimal creatures and kill other players, and there is no need to get creative since there is nothing meaningful to use your creativity on.

Part of the reason Wildcard develops the game in this is way is a problem of their own making too. With every bit of progression being such a massive time-sink, time efficiency is the top priority for most dedicated players when they do any gameplay activity. It's the one of the only aspects of "skill" that this game has. This causes Wildcard to be very paranoid that any creative mechanic they introduce will be exploitable and ruin the overall PvP balance which they oh-so desperately focus on over everything else for some f***ing reason. It's extremely problematic despite what some people think which that this game is perfect as a MMO-ish grind-fest. They forget that while many games are played in this efficiency-focused, hardcore fashion, the problem with ARK is that you can't play it in any other way if you want to progress and feel rewarded for your time and effort. The vast majority of ARK players wish they could enjoy every facet of the game (PvP, PvE, survival, tech progression, building) without being forced to play like a game addict by WC's horrible, short-sighted design. The absolute importance of time efficiency also means no one is going to try to play the game to have fun and the game's community will be extremely hostile to many balance and design changes if so much work can be lost when anything bad happens.

To talk about the bigger picture, I've been saying from day 1 that they've needed to focus on improving the interaction between players and dinosaurs. That's the game's hook that gets people interested. It's one of its core concepts but they've wasted so much of its potential. Hell, I would go so far to say that if they removed the one mechanic of "rideable dinosaurs", it's long-term viability as a game would totally vanish. I swear it's the whole reason the ARK playerbase does not die immediately despite how terrible everything else is and I hate Wildcard for the fact that they've taken the success of that one idea so much for granted. Anyways, even if they didn't develop the "live with dinosaurs" idea to it's full potential, the other core concepts of survival and building could've been developed to make an a very good survival building game which also has dinosaurs. Instead they've been foolishly developing the game like it's an MMO that has just been released: adding content is their first priority, seemingly at the expense of everything else it needs as an alpha early-access title. It's sad but WC just can't see the forest for the trees (or it's too late for them to notice) and have wasted what I think is one of the best game concepts to have ever been imagined.

Oh, Wildcard knows exactly what they're doing. The people involved have created grindfests in the past, and they're creating one now. And I mean, that's how you create a lot of concurrent users and retention time, if even the most mundane of tasks take 10 hours, everyone racks up a thousand pretty quick.

What grindfests are you referring to? I'm genuinely curious to know what games the WC developers have been involved in that you're referring to. I know that one guy who was "associated" with Wildcard, the guy who caused the multi-million dollar lawsuit, was from Trendy Entertainment, creators of the relatively grindy Dungeon Defenders. That's the limit of my knowledge though.

Both of those games' communities are crap but I'm not familiar with any recent update to either game has caused the level of player outrage that the ARK community has right now. Both games are actually quite balanced despite what people might say.

That said, RangiNZ doesn't accomplish much comparing ARK to Dota2/LoL because those two are matched-based versus games, completely different from ARK which is a fully persistent grind-based sandbox. Even the smallest change in ARK can have a cascading effect on how the game is played by people that take it seriously.

They are a well made machine, but not a well made developer. Csgo fans have big issues with Valve. Making portal and half life have little to do with the ui or hud development they are doing, which honestly, they are looking clueless about.

Valve is a better creator than maintainer is really the gist of it. The technical side of the company (non-artists) is filled with designers and engineers that are good at making things but they don't have the testers, managers, and operations people to make sure that, throughout their lifespans, the many facets of their products are well-polished.

How much the HUD covers the screen is a big deal but it really only affects the skill floor imo, and I agree with you. I play both League and Dota 2, and while Dota 2 trumps League in so many ways, it can be pretty frustrating in Dota 2 to feel like you have to look at two places at once since the vertical screen space is so damn limited by the UI. Long range spells like Laguna Blade can hit you from off your screen all the time if you aren't good at controlling your camera. League doesn't have that problem and it immediately makes the game more comfortable to play without sacrificing any of the game's meaningful depth. Anyone that thinks that having a limited, zoomed-in camera is a good idea should just look at the fantastic balance that Starcraft 2's camera system has struck and then try to say "muh skillcap".

I think there are a couple reasons that the scene is the way it is right now.

The scene is new. In NBA for example, the players had to fight for this in the 60s, and it took a threat to sit out the all star games for the players to unionize. This was more than a decade after the league was founded. When it's new, the money just wasn't there. Dota grew really really fast, 5 years ago top teams were competing in 5 figure tournaments. The money for agents/managers didn't exist. Now it does.

The scene is too unstable. with teams constantly forming and disbanding, there's too much room for shady people to come in and do a cash grab. Compared to the major leagues in sports, they rarely do this as they have a long term reputation to keep.

The players are just not educated enough. Lots of them leave high school to play, and they have to deal with these business people who have way more experience. I'm not saying the players are not smart people, but we see this shit in boxing all the time, talented players just get fucked because they don't know how to deal with negotiation and large sum of money. I mean fuck, who did when they were 20 years old?

Until you solve these problems just hiring a lawyer won't work. Sure it's a deterrence, but contracts are useless if you don't sue, and international law suits are difficult and expensive. If the organization is on the other side of the world who can disappear any time, the ROI of enforcing contracts for 50 grand might not even be worth it. Since aside from the risk of investment in lawyers, there's the risk of the people/organization simply disappear/refuse to pay even when they lose/go bankrupt.

Nahaz made the point though that just an hour or two of a lawyer's time just to review a contract could be a good step in the right direction and not terribly expensive. I'm not an expert on business negotiations or how lawyers offer their services to people, but this seems like a very reasonable thing for players to do if it's possible.

This should be higher. People always praise valve as some bastion of goodwill, but at the end of the day it's a business trying to make as much profit as it can, and valve won't turn down ads based on some moral ground.

I think you misunderstand what /u/JimmaDaRustla is saying. The only things keeping Valve from using just the compendium and minor tech sponsorships as their sources of revenue are, in a sense, nothing more than moral reasons. The sports broadcasting industry has a template which is provably lucrative that Valve could have adopted but they didn't because they believed they could provide a more desirable product in the long-term without it. It should be astounding that, in this day and age, Valve exists at all in it's current state: a business willing to make major decisions because they have faith in an idea instead of using every facet of their business and every tool at their disposal to make more money.

That's pretty much the reason that Riot should have slapped themselves before they even thought about writing that. Practicing and drills have been a part of almost every sport and every game since time immemorial, and everyone and their mother understands that practicing is a choice that people make because they want to get better at whatever they do. It takes dedication and a work ethic to practice effectively, and never in a million years would it be "unfair" for someone to win and be successful because of it. The entire draw of a competitive game comes from the fact that you have to learn and improve your skills in order to win, and practice empowers those that engage in it because it gives them alternative way to do those things. It's beyond me that Riot is so absolutely concerned with player retention and "lowering toxicity" that they would deny their players such a helpful tool, one that by every other measure improves the game and increases it's long-term viability as a sport.

It's funny how the "stream monsters" term is used most in the FGC. I guess it makes sense since it's a community whose members have the mindfulness to encourage and highlight good sportsmanship between players as opposed to constantly pandering to rabid fanboys and Twitch meme lovers.

This is exactly what I wish people would understand. The whole "if people like All Pick, let them play All Pick" argument is flawed because it fails to acknowledge that, ultimately, queue times govern what game mode the vast majority of the player-base prefers. Even a relatively small discrepancy in queue times can end up snowballing into a situation where everyone's using one queue over another because, more than anything else, they don't want to waste their time. Just because All Pick is more convenient doesn't automatically make it better. One of the few things that the Dota 2 can learn from League of Legends is that it has successfully used a variant of the "All Draft" idea (the only major difference is that each team gets a captain that's chosen in a semi-random fashion who chooses 3 champions to ban before people pick their char's) from the very beginning and few people have ever had serious complaints about it.

There's actually a pretty specific event that could've started the hatred. Pendragon at Riot Games was once the creator and owner of Dota-Allstars.com, which was the biggest hub for the community of the original Dota. Of course, he moved on to work for Riot Game, but soon after League of Legends became really big, Dota-Allstars and it's thousands and thousands of forum posts and community contributions suddenly fell off the face of the earth. It was replaced with simple webpage with a "letter" written by Pendragon basically saying that he was moving on from from Dota and it's community entirely and ended it with a blatant advertisement for LoL. In that letter there was also promise that he would give public access to some form of the forum archives but it was never fulfilled.

All of the events related to Dota-Allstars's shutdown, Pendragon's letter and the meteoric rise of LoL combined to make the Dota community feel incredibly betrayed by Pendragon and, in a sense, betrayed but the success of LoL itself. Also, there's hatred between LoL and Heroes of Newerth that has been around for even longer, and it's assured that some of it has been brought over into the Dota 2 community as HoN fans moved to the "new" game.

Holy balls, it's a lot of fun to play for me. As I keep playing, there is just so much to improve on, and all the heroes feel special enough that you have to give an effort to improve on each specifically. Each hero feels good to play (although some feel better than others). Beyond that, the maps are all diverse enough that playing them in rotation doesn't get old for me, and there is so much to each map and hero that I never feel like I'm playing the exact match twice. Maybe it's because it is more individually technically demanding than a MOBA or maybe it's because the meta isn't settled, but it feels good either way.

I know people that don't like it as much, and the flavor is going to be different for everybody. Solo queuing is a beast that wears on everybody, but otherwise people love playing with at least 1 friend as far as I know.

I actually like solo-queuing in Overwatch since it seems like anything can happen. Perhaps when I get more cynical and win-focused (and find a friend that I would actually bother playing with) I'll prefer to partner up but for now the frustration isn't too bad.

Most people are just not going to commit to watching a lot of a game they can't play, because most don't have the patience to learn about a game thay can't play. Only a small minority of people would do that. The number of people who know how the game is played is the biggest limiting factor in the current Twitch numbers. The viewcount is going to explode after release, though there's no telling for how long, or how much.

I was actually a part of that "small minority" for Overwatch until I got access to the beta, and I guess I'm proud that dedication. Sometimes I actually get very, very interested in games that I'll never really play if there's a lot to learn (and a YouTube channel that makes good informational content for it or a Twitch streamer with a good personality).

One way or another, I can definitely say to the OP that the game is so much more fun to play than to watch.

This game isn't being developed for solo play. The devs continuously mention that they want people to work together to build.

Examples of this range from the length of tame times, to the amount of resources required for some endgame items, to the design of the quetzal tame (it can be done with one person, but the design is to have it done with 2 or more), to the fact that they don't want people to have enough engram points to learn all engrams. Why is that do you ask? They want you and your team to specialize.

Hence if you want to play solo it is extremely difficult. My suggestion is to tweak your settings when playing single player, not to necessarily make it easier but to make it more enjoyable and feasible. Farming 20 behemoth gates is supposed to be done by 5+ people, not one person and a metal pick.

There's a difference between encouraging people to work together by making their time in-game more productive and fun and FORCING people to work together because the game has obviously been balanced so that they can't accomplish certain things alone. Both are different ways of presenting and designing the challenges of the game but, overall, the first is empowering and enjoyable and the other, as effective as it is at getting players to cooperate, is still more on the frustrating side.

I'm laying all of this out because I think the game gains very little from new content that's like the fucking bunk bed that's purpose-made for the PvP, grindy side of it. Improvements to the solo experience and the PvE experience ultimately benefit everyone that plays the game and, at some point, should be a bigger priority than PvP content. Also, modding and a million adjustable server settings are great features, no doubt, but from my perspective they seem like a cop-out for their questionable balance choices.

Well, the OP's point is that while servers and their communities can evolve in a fascinating way, the ebb-and-flow of that process comes at the expense of the patience of the people actually playing the game making these things happen.

Personally, I do think that ARK's progression, which is very much based around time-investments and acceleration (i.e. spending time and resources so you can get resources faster), is going to eventually result in stagnation on even the most hardcore PvP servers. After a certain point, the only things that will cause conflict are either new tribes causing shit or established tribes getting really bored. This game could definitely be better designed to encourage interaction and competition for all parties involved (established tribes, raiders, low-level tribes, etc) in a server.